Tag: .NET

Teamstream and its clients have a problem understanding the content inside their video libraries—a problem not just for them, but for everyone who uses traditional methods of archiving and retrieving videos. A video is typically created by a team, indifferently tagged, and saved out to a file in some repository—a file server or a cloud-based shared service like YouTube. In both cases, the videos are stored in a folder structure which is organized by client and by project. This type of methodology is extremely limiting when searching for particular videos. What is the job number? Which client was that? Did we do similar videos? Is this the right version? The difficulty multiplies when you want to search for specific content within videos. If a video is not tagged or named correctly—which is often the case—it can be impossible to find what you’re looking for. Teamstream Productions was looking for a “fix” that offered deep searching capabilities within a set of videos, a fix that would be accessible through multiple channels so that if the team is on the go or giving a presentation, they can access this search through mobile or web. Read more “Cognitive Services Computer Vision API powers Teamstream video search”

I am working on a new app that utilizes local JSON as well as JSON and XML results from a RESTful service. I enjoy the local JSON with Visual Studio 2013 and Windows Store app since I can bind my JSON data to my XAML to view it at design time. Saves a lot of time when it comes to spacing and determining what your UI looks like.

However, when I tried to run my app I get one of those lovely error messages.

WinRT information: No mapping for the Unicode character exists in the target multi-byte code page.

WTF! Something is obviously wrong with my JSON. So I perform the following troubleshooting routines.

I take the JSON and go to a online validator to ensure that is it valid. (I use JSONLint.com. It does a fine job.) It should be valid because the XAML designer shows my data, but just to be safe.

Skim through my JSON looking for ‘ or any other character that should not be in there.

All of which proves to be unsuccessful. So what do I do.

Well, apparently in Visual Studio you have the ability to save files in different formats. If you open the file in Visual Studio, then go to the File Menu and choose Advanced Save Options you can choose different file encodings. The encoding that came up for my JSON file was Western European (not sure why we are still called Western European but that is a different post).

I changed the encoding from Western European to Unicode UTF-8. Magically it worked!

Hopefully this will help anyone who runs into a issue similar to the one I had with Unicode.